Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is far too astute a politician not to recognize that this month’s Agro Fest event possesses a significance that extends way beyond a ‘family event’ hosted by her country’s agriculture sector, annually, to offer Far-mers, Craft Persons and Agro Processors an opportunity to parade their goods before a more than usual audience. This year’s event seems set to centre around circumstances that have to do with the Carib-bean as a whole, and more particularly, with regional concerns that have to do with what, in some instances, are critical food security considerations.
What the 2022 Barbados Agro Fest did was to focus attention on the importance of creating a more robust food security infrastructure, the Caribbean having discovered that the notion that, somehow, the region was ‘immune’ to food insecurity was no more than a chimera. We have discovered, as well, that such efforts, as have been made to strengthen our food security credentials, had failed largely on account of a lack of will. Contextually, what Agro Fest 2022 – and before that the Agri Investment Forum and Expo in Guyana – did was to help refocus the attention of a distracted region on some of its more critical but less discussed challenges. What had already been known, but never really openly admitted, was that we, as a region, are still to understand the saying that the noise in the market is not the sale, which, roughly translated, means that however much you talk an objective to death the need to put in the ‘hard yards’ necessary for its realization never goes away.
To return to the matter of Agro Fest 2023, the barometers that would be required to be used to measure its success are clear. First, we would need to deliver, during the event itself, a clear and persuasive update on just how much progress the region has made towards the realization of the promised Regional Food Terminal which must include a definitive update on the progress that had been made by the two ‘lead’ territories, Barbados and Guyana, in their respective assignments. If a satisfactory update cannot be delivered that would be, to say the least, decidedly disappointing. Secondly, the countries of the region are going to have to be provided with a clear indication of when the Terminal is likely to become operational and the mechanics of how it will work. Here again, if significant clarity cannot be delivered on this issue, we run the risk of a déjà vu outcry that harks back to the various earlier regional food security undertakings that fell flat on their faces.
But the regional food security initiative goes far beyond the outcomes of the effort to establish a Food Security Terminal. Going forward there, are large swathes of the Caribbean that are going to have to make the psychological adjustments associated with pushing back the Tsunami of imported foods to which, historically, we have become addicted. Indeed, it would hardly be unfair to say that the region’s incrementally degraded food security status has been, in large measure, a function of a certain level of indifference on the part of our political leaders to policies that strongly support aggressive food security undertakings. While we have arrived at a juncture where it appears that here in the Caribbean there is now a much greater political awareness of the serious deficiencies in our food security credentials, there exists, up to this time, no universal evidence that as a region, we are altogether mindful of the challenge that we face.
The political response has, as is customary, been laced with slogans (25×2025 comes immediately to mind) which we in the region have grown accustomed to employing as a means of galvanizing immediate-term but by no means sustained support for the particular idea. History has provided us with more than sufficient evidence that that ploy never really works in the longer term. If, this time around, we can be afforded a really positive report on just how far away we are from creating a robust framework for that promised regional Food Security Terminal, that might well serve to create the kind of regional mindset that might set our feet on the right path.
